by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
I have gone into great detail here and on my Instagram account about my concept for a new social media platform. But this post is about what, specifically, we need to do to fix the obviously broken social media model.
First and foremost, we need to manage bots and trolls better. I would go so far as to say that if you built a better mousetrap and, in essence, required all your users to be, like, real people and stuff, that that would go a long way to fixing the problems associated with modern social media.
The reason Twitter is such a shit hole is they willfully facilitate bots and trolls’ use of the service. If you built a service from the ground up that made it difficult for bots to use the service as well as had an aggressive, proactive management of trolls I think you would win over a lot people who feel overwhelmed by Twitter’s shit experience.
Another thing I would do is give verified account holders on a service a sense of stakeholdership by giving them added rights and responsibilities. In my fevered imagination, you might give them the ability to make Groups that would be the cornerstone of the service. Theses Groups would be divided into Discussions that would be a mixture of the old AOL Chat Rooms and the old Usenet news groups. It’s a start, at least. Twitter wasn’t designed for discussion and if you built a service from the ground up for just that then I think it would be a success. Yes, Reddit exists, but I don’t like the interface and you would need a service designed more as a Twitter Killer than a Reddit Killer. Reddit does its job quite effectively, while Twitter, alas, does not.
It’s weird that it’s so obvious that you could build an effective competitor to Twitter doing these basic things and…yet…no one seems all that interested in doing it. Probably because the nerds in Silicon Valley are now abuzz over AR and VR. Social media is a dead issue to them and they just don’t see the point. It’s a mature market and they see no challenge.
And, yet, Twitter is so bad and such a threat to the Republic that something needs to be done. I would do it myself, but I have no money, can’t code and don’t want to learn.
